This is such a fascinating post! And really interesting conversations.
I also talked a bit about commercialisation of fandom before, and have a couple more drafts related to the topic. The whole "looking for community" vs "looking for an audience" is something I still struggle to adapt to as well. Returning to Dreamwidth is helping me, I think. Maybe the schism other people mention is something that's slowly happening, or needs to as different people look for different things in fandom.
AO3 is so large - I find many of my readers come from discord friends, posting on a couple of servers. I see people who say they never browse AO3 and will only read if the author promotes their fic on Twitter in the tags. I did it for a while but the platform stresses me out so I decided I was happy with the smaller readership.
But stepping back, I realised how much of the "influencer" culture is steeping in there. People encourage each other to be less shy about self-promoting, and create tweets promoting their stories, and retweeting their own announcements to reach people in different timezones. Even when they're not selling anything or have a ko-fi, etc! I see authors linking to the specific story tweet in the author notes as well so that it's easy for readers to jump to Twitter after finishing and retweet/promote the story to their own followers.
Which is all fine, you know! It's just... it feels like running a business, haha. These are fine strategies to use to increase your "audience" which is important when you need to convert X% into paying customers. People just copy these patterns because they're everywhere these days, with people trying to monetise their hobbies, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes because that's what everybody else seems to be doing.
I want the people who would enjoy my stories to find them, but I don't need to have the biggest audience ever, and a cosy fandom experience with a few people sharing similar tastes suits me better in general. My BNF friends seem to get a lot of draining interactions, with the additional attention.
Would it be okay if I linked to this post in my journal? I think it's very interesting and would like to share.
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I also talked a bit about commercialisation of fandom before, and have a couple more drafts related to the topic. The whole "looking for community" vs "looking for an audience" is something I still struggle to adapt to as well. Returning to Dreamwidth is helping me, I think. Maybe the schism other people mention is something that's slowly happening, or needs to as different people look for different things in fandom.
AO3 is so large - I find many of my readers come from discord friends, posting on a couple of servers. I see people who say they never browse AO3 and will only read if the author promotes their fic on Twitter in the tags. I did it for a while but the platform stresses me out so I decided I was happy with the smaller readership.
But stepping back, I realised how much of the "influencer" culture is steeping in there. People encourage each other to be less shy about self-promoting, and create tweets promoting their stories, and retweeting their own announcements to reach people in different timezones. Even when they're not selling anything or have a ko-fi, etc! I see authors linking to the specific story tweet in the author notes as well so that it's easy for readers to jump to Twitter after finishing and retweet/promote the story to their own followers.
Which is all fine, you know! It's just... it feels like running a business, haha. These are fine strategies to use to increase your "audience" which is important when you need to convert X% into paying customers. People just copy these patterns because they're everywhere these days, with people trying to monetise their hobbies, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes because that's what everybody else seems to be doing.
I want the people who would enjoy my stories to find them, but I don't need to have the biggest audience ever, and a cosy fandom experience with a few people sharing similar tastes suits me better in general. My BNF friends seem to get a lot of draining interactions, with the additional attention.
Would it be okay if I linked to this post in my journal? I think it's very interesting and would like to share.